In my first piece for The Week, I'm discussing why the lack of high-quality masks is our pandemic failures in miniature. Throughout the pandemic, Americans have made extraordinary sacrifices to slow the spread of the virus. We haven't been unequal to the disaster, but our leaders' lapses have left people filling in the gaps of… Read More
Tag: covid
All Aboard the Generation Ship!
Nearly a year into the pandemic, I wrote an essay for Breaking Ground on how we can persist in hope by drawing on sci-fi stories of generation ships. A generation ship spans the wide gap of time between planets. No one aboard at the beginning of the journey expects to see the destination. They commit… Read More
Careers and Coronavirus
Yale offers a series of ongoing fireside chats, where students and recent graduates can hear other graduates' advice about their given field. I joined in recently for a panel that wasn't focused on any particular career path, but rather on how to approach careers during the coronavirus pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V-Wr3RRk6o Obviously, I have no special expertise… Read More
All the Screen’s a Stage
When the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA had to close its playhouse due to the pandemic, I audited their online classes as a reporter for The American Interest. During a discussion of alliteration, one smaller girl, attending the class with her big sister, stumbles on Bottom’s tongue-twister of a line, “I trust to take of truest… Read More
Discernment in Plague-Times
I wrote at First Things on Kristen Lavransdatter as a primer for living a life of Christian service and witness in a pandemic. It was intended, among other things, as a rejoinder to the idea that sheltering in place was cowardice. Someday when our children ask us “What did you do during the coronavirus pandemic?,” it won’t… Read More
Locating Our Invisible Wounds
At Comment I wrote about how the coronavirus links us in a solidarity of suffering. But we'll have to work to retain that solidarity with the more everyday kinds of suffering when the pandemic passes. This piece was published in partnership with the Breaking Ground project, which asks how we can use this time of disruption… Read More
Read More